Whirling back on the justice, Bass said, “There it is. What more you need from us? This man knows who his master is—and his master gonna free him for all time. You don’t do it, I’ll find someone else who will.”
His scraped and scalded face turning crimson at the youngster’s rebuke, the justice rose from behind his cherrywood desk and slammed a hand down with a resounding thud that echoed in the small office to the side of his store. “That’s just what you’re gonna have to do then, sonny. I ain’t gonna have it on my conscience that I let a young boy like you go off an’ do something foolish: turning your Negra into a freedman! I’ll declare! Where you ever took a notion like that?”
Bass watched the fat-jowled man walk off, removing his sleeveless robe, returning to his shop next door. He stopped once, turned back on the two of them, and waved them out of his clapboard office. Bass turned to go, finding the boatmen pressing their noses against the murky panes of window glass, watching it all.
“So you get it done proper?” Root inquired when Titus and Hezekiah stepped out the door onto the board walk.
A gust of wind closed the door behind them. On the street again. In the cold. Bass looked up at the faces expectant of his answer. “Any of you got a idea where I can get me a paper says Hezekiah here is a freedman?”
Kingsbury rocked back on his heels, saying, “This be the only man what can do it right for you.”
“No matter now. I stay with you, Titus Bass,” Hezekiah replied. “Till we find right man to do it.”
Beulah wagged her head. “That old frog. Shame on him.”
“Ain’t no other but him,” Kingsbury argued.
“Sometimes, I declare, Hames—you’re so addleminded,” Beulah said, then turned to Titus to say quietly, “We just have to find us someone what can write.”
Turning to stare at the woman, Titus found himself dumbfounded by the simplicity of what she was suggesting. “You saying we get someone to write up a paper for us?”
Beulah’s eyes glanced at the boatmen before coming back to rest on Titus’s. “And we have ’em sign that old frog’s name to it.”
“That’s gotta be about as close to stepping outside the law as anything I ever heard!” Kingsbury complained.
“You get found out,” Ovatt squealed, “there’ll be stripes to pay on your back, Titus! Not just this here Negra’s.”
Beulah poked a finger into Kingsbury’s chest, saying, “And you’re telling me you ain’t ever done all sorts of foul things at the edge of the law?”
“I ain’t never used a goddamned man’s name to do anything wrong!”
“It ain’t wrong,” Beulah protested. “I figure it’s about as right as right can be.”
In that moment Titus felt as proud as he could be for her, the way she gave the three boatmen pause, struck them dumb, unable to convince her.
Kingsbury’s eyes blinked, as if he were working on something hard and fast behind them. “Right, or wrong—we get caught, this here is more serious’n causing a ruckus on a gunboat—”
“More serious’n killing a man—or a whore, Hames?”
“They was … she was fixing to kill us.”
“So it was the right thing to do,” Beulah said. “Just like this is the right thing for Titus here.” With the three boatmen silenced, each of them standing there gape-mouthed, she turned to the youngster. “Now, you remember what that justice man’s name was?”
Twisting his neck this way and that to search for some writing on the door or the window, Titus squinted, making sense of the letters and their placement. “Lu … ther L. P-pond.”
Seemingly of a changed mind, Kingsbury slapped an arm around Bass’s shoulder, his eyes darting up the street, then down. “Just get your paper writ up so we can get us over to Mathilda’s place.”
“Mathilda’s place?” Titus repeated.
“Don’t tell me you forgot awready,” Ovatt said.
Root snorted, “Hell, I’d a’figured Mincemeat made Titus here a real comeback customer of hers.”
“Hold on there, Hames Kingsbury! You ain’t taking me to no such a place!” Beulah scolded. “Never been in one before, an’ I don’t intend to start now.”
His palms coming up apologetically, Kingsbury started to explain, “Just a place where we can get us a square meal and a stout drink—”
“An’ half-dressed women all hanging off you too!” Beulah snapped. “Wanting to dip their hands in your purse.”
“But we got us old friends there,” Kingsbury protested.
“Not no more, you don’t.” And she crossed her arms, turning from him huffily.
The pilot stepped around to face her, but again she whirled from him. “Beulah?”
“You fixing on marrying me like you said, your whoring days is done, Hames Kingsbury.”
“M-marrying?” Root stammered. “That right—”
Kingsbury gestured for silence from them all as he took hold of Beulah’s shoulders. “Course I’m gonna marry you—”
“You won’t never again need no whore, Mr. Kingsbury,” the woman told him. “I’m going downriver with you every trip.”
With a mixture of excitement mingled with awe at the sudden announcement, Titus watched and listened as Beulah and the pilot finally declared what the two of them had been discussing for much of the long journey up from New Orleans.
Ovatt whirled on Root and asked, “An’ you’re telling me you didn’t know?”
“I … I knowed they was thick,” Reuben sputtered sheepishly.
“Yeah, real thick. ’bout as thick as your skull,” Ovatt said, then held his hand out to Kingsbury.
“Maybe you three ought’n go on over to Mathilda’s by yourselves,” the pilot said as they shook in turn, nodding at Beulah. “Me and the woman find us another place to bed in for the night.”
“Mean you’ll meet us down by the wharf come morning?” Root asked.
“Count on finding me there, waiting for all you late sleepers,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down with no small satisfaction as Beulah finally stepped to his side and threaded her arm through his. “This crew still got us a few miles left afore we get all the way back up the Ohio to Cincinnati, where I can buy us ’nother flatboat. Ain’t nothing changed my mind ’bout you an’ Heman still working the river with me.”
Root flicked a glance at Ovatt, then asked, “So you still figuring you need us?”
“Need you? Why, the hull lot of us been making a home on the river for years,” Kingsbury snorted.
Then Beulah leaned forward to say, “You think just because me and Hames gonna be a pair now that we don’t need you fellas? That it? Damned nonsense! If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re both crazy as a mad coon. Me being your pilot’s wife don’t change a thing.”
“But, well … there’s some fellers what’d be afeared of having a woman on their boat—not saying it’d be me, you unnerstant,” Root explained.
“Are you such a man?” Beulah asked.
Root smiled gamely and tried to shrug it off. “Maybeso you ain’t no more bad luck than anything else, Beulah.”
She leaned over to him and planted a kiss on Reuben’s cheek. “That mean you figure it’s awright for me to be part of your crew?”
While Root blushed, wide-eyed, Ovatt was the first to nod his head. Reluctantly, Reuben finally spoke up. “You’re part of the crew—just as long as you keep us fed and the coffee on.”
“I can do that,” Beulah replied as she slipped back beside Kingsbury. “And since Titus here ain’t gonna be part of the crew no longer, you’ll likely need me to spell you fellas on an oar or the gouger from time to time.”
A look of surprise crossed Ovatt’s face. “You do that man’s work too?”
“I been a boat pilot’s woman since I can remember,” she answered with a confident tilt to her chin. “So don’t you think I can put my hands to every chore on a flatboat, including taking my turn at the rudder?”
“See, boys?” Kingsbury said confidently. “Just l
ike I found out for myself—this here’s one woman what can take care of her own self when it comes to a Kentucky broadhorn on the river.”
With a happy wag of his head Root cheered, “Looks like we’re back to being a foursome, it does at that!”
Ovatt nodded in agreement, saying, “When Ebenezer was kill’t, I figured Titus here was the one bound to fill out our crew. S’why I got real worried when he said he wasn’t gonna make a life on the river with us.”
“No matter that he’s going off on his own to do what he wants—now there’s four of us,” Kingsbury summed it up, then suddenly turned to the skinny youth. “Still, I wish I could find the words to make you wanna stay with us, Titus Bass.”
Titus struggled to explain how he wanted to press on, reaching for his dream. “Far back as I can remember, I been thinking on making for Louisville.”
Ovatt asked, “Come here to stretch your wings a bit?”
“Likely I will do that—if’n there’s any stretching left to do after that float down to Nor leans with the lot of you.”
“Out yonder lays a great big world, Titus—just waiting for you. And there’s allays the women and the whiskey while a young feller’s tasting it all,” Kingsbury said, stepping right up to Bass. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“Only till you get back down the Ohio come spring,” Bass reassured them, sensing a sour ball of sentiment begin to clog his throat.
“That’s right, Hames,” Root added. “Titus says he’s gonna be right here in Louisville where we can look him up every trip down.”
“Less’n Mincemeat kills him first!” Kingsbury joked, then clumsily threw his arms about the youngster. Into Titus’s ear he whispered, “You’ll take care of yourself now, hear?”
With the salty smart of his own tears and the sudden self-conscious silence surrounding them all, Bass could only nod, locked within the pilot’s crude embrace. He was unaccustomed to such a sharing of emotion between men. Finding this thing of hugging a strange custom, yet discovering that embrace made him feel truly accepted. There and then he thought back with some regret, wishing his father had been the sort to show just this sort of affection. Still after all, none of his family had ever stood on that physical side of things. Not even his mother, not with all that she said and did. None of his kin had ever been much taken with outwardly showing warmth and affection.
So much did that river pilot’s embrace mean to him that as soon as Kingsbury released him and took a step back, a sudden and chilling sense of loss swept over him. So much so that Bass was about to say he just might reconsider staying on with them—when Kingsbury reached up, tousled his hair, and gazed into Titus’s face.
With glistening eyes the pilot said, “Just look at you, son. Come a long way from being that poorly critter what walked outta the woods on our night fire way back last fall. Cain’t no man dare say you ain’t come a long way, Titus Bass.”
Try as he might to fight it, he could feel a tear escape from one eye, his lips quivering slightly as he fought to find the words—damning himself for such a childish display, angry at showing that sort of weakness here in the company of these strong men. But when he looked up, Bass saw Kingsbury’s tears spill into his short-cropped, matted blond beard.
The pilot swiped at them carelessly as Beulah gripped his arm tight, her own eyes red-rimmed and brimming. With a voice suddenly sounding like a door dragged over its sill, Kingsbury said, “We’ll see you here by the Ohio come late spring.”
In the next heartbeat he had Beulah turned and moving away into the fading light of that winter afternoon.
“C’mon, Titus,” Ovatt said, stoically refusing to let sentiment get the best of him as he grabbed hold of Bass’s arm. “We gotta get over to Mathilda’s and see if Mincemeat still remembers you.”
Locked there between the two boatmen sweeping off to have themselves a spree, Titus was pulled away a few steps before he realized he had forgotten someone.
He jerked to a stop, turning around there in the last reddish splash of winter’s afternoon sunlight, gazing back at the Negro. “You comin’, Hezekiah?”
With only a shrug of his big, broad shoulders, the slave answered, his head hung, chin to chest. Confused, Titus hurried back to him, saw the tracks of moisture tracing shiny indigo furrows down the tattooed ebony cheeks.
Softly, Titus asked, “You’re comin’, ain’t you?”
The big man answered, “You be going away from me soon, yes?”
“Hezekiah—I’m gonna see that you’re set free. Ain’t that what you want?”
“Free, yes. Free and go with Titus Bass.”
“Maybeso you ought’n not be free with me no longer,” Titus replied, trying to explain. “Maybeso you ought’n move on, go and try out your own wings now, Hezekiah.”
The big chert-black eyes sought his out with their moistness. “Then we say good-bye soon.”
“Not soon. Not tonight, anyways. Don’t have to be tonight. C’mon, you go with us over to Mathilda’s place. A fine place, with good food and lots of noisy folks.”
“T-titus,” Root began tentatively in a harsh whisper. “They don’t ’llow Negras in Mathilda’s place.”
“The hell they don’t!” Bass snapped indignantly. “I seen some back to the kitchen.”
“They the help. So that’s right where he can stay when we go in the place,” Ovatt suggested. “Back with Mathilda’s help.”
Titus turned on the slave. “That be awright with you? Get your meal and maybe a place to curl up for the night back in the kitchen?”
“Be good to eat,” he answered. “Good to find a warm place to sleep too.”
Titus patted the tall slave on the arm. “Then in the morning we find us someone what can write, to make out my paper says you’re a freedman now.”
“Damn!” Root exclaimed, slapping himself alongside the head. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”
Titus asked, “Think of what?”
“Mathilda her own self,” Root said, grinning. “She knows how to make her letters and cipher her numbers with the best of ’em. There ain’t many in Louisville gonna be any better’n her at it.”
A sudden relief washed over Bass, despite all the raw tearing away and loss. The whorehouse madam would be the one to inscribe for Hezekiah that handwritten gift of freedom, thereby lifting a yoke from Titus’s own neck with the same stroke of her quill. Now more than ever Bass realized no man should ever belong to another.
“There, Hezekiah!” he cheered. “Tomorry you’ll be a freedman. You can go where you want. When you want. Ain’t gonna belong to no man but your own self from then on.”
“But,” the big slave said, his eyes still brimming, “I allays belong to you.”
Bass shook his head. “No, don’t you understand? I’m freeing you. Don’t belong to no one no more. Never did belong to me.”
Hezekiah wagged his head emphatically. “No, Titus Bass. You not understand,” he replied sternly. “You go make me a freedman, sure enough. But in here”—and he again tapped a single finger against his chest—“no matter what: I allays belong to you.”
18
Mincemeat wasn’t there when Titus showed up at Mathilda’s that bittersweet night of parting mingled with homecoming.
“She’s up and left me to work downriver,” the madam said a little huffily.
“Downriver?” Titus asked anxiously. “How far?”
“Place called Owensboro. Gone off on her own—and the trollop took two of my girls with her!” the madam explained. “Said the three of ’em going into business for themselves.”
Turning to Root, Bass hurriedly asked, “Where’s Owensboro?”
“If’n it’s the place I’m thinking it be, wasn’t much there—”
“Where?” Titus interrupted.
“Only a few poor cabins ’long the wharf—”
“Where?” And he grabbed the boatman’s coat flap.
“Downriver a ways,” Reuben explained. “They was just clearing a s
pot for it on the south bank when we come past few months back.”
“On the Ohio?”
Root nodded. “I’d make it ’bout halfways to the Messessap from here.”
“I took her in, give her a chance to make something of herself,” Mathilda grumbled as she turned away, waving toward one of her Negro lackeys. “I’ll see that the help brings you boys your supper while I go off to fetch my writing things … if you’re still of a mind to free up that skin-headed Negra of yours.”
Titus bobbed his head. “Yes’m. I am.”
Mathilda smiled as she started away, smoothing the chintz cloth that covered only half of her ample bosom. “Anyone who’s got manners enough to call me ma’am gets my attention, fellas.”
When she returned, the madam eloquently worded two copies of the same declaration freeing Hezekiah. One, of course, would go with the freedman, and the second Titus chose to keep for himself, protected inside a small waxed fold of foolscap. Then she had one of her lackeys escort Bass back to her own room, where a steaming kettle of soapy water was soon delivered. With a scrap of cambric cloth he scrubbed himself from the washbasin in the corner of the lamplit room, then found the plush softness of her feather mattress an inviting contrast from the crude grass ticks he had so far encountered.
When at last he was awakened there in Mathilda’s bed, all but one of the oil lamps had been snuffed. Soft, pudgy fingers were at his flesh, arousing him gently. A hot whisper clung to his ear as the madam declared she would give him all the sweet delights she could that night, in fact, whenever he wanted to visit her, seeing how he was going to stay on in Louisville.
As good as it felt, what with her fingers raking up and down the hard, hot length of him, the way she smelled good and sweet from cinnamon and tamarind she had rubbed on her neck and down her heaving cleavage—how he found her fleshy plumpness so startling after Mincemeat’s angular hardness—right then Titus didn’t have the will to tell Mathilda that he had determined to move on.
That hadn’t even come up at all when he’d slipped out to gulp down some coffee and swallow the hot breakfast the Kangaroo’s kitchen served. There among the great boiling kettles and the sweaty, shiny faces of Mathilda’s black-skinned help, Titus retrieved one of the declarations from inside his shirt. As Hezekiah held one corner of the wrinkled paper, Bass held the other, preparing to read it aloud for all in that stunned kitchen where thick aromas swirled up from three fireplaces.
Dance on the Wind Page 47